The present invention relates generally to electronic messaging and more particularly to a method of saving an electronic mail message to a storage location on a computer storage device.
Emails have become an important part of communications for business and personal use. Emails offer a quick and effective means of communicating between remote senders and receivers. Corporate and non-corporate individuals use emails to transmit information to family members, clients, business associates, and the like. Not only do emails expedite communication, but emails also provide a “written” record of what was communicated from a sender to a receiver. This is especially important in corporate or business settings where it is often desirous to keep a record of communications sent from or received by one member or all members in the organization.
An email message folder, such as a “sent” folder, may be configured for storing copies of emails sent by a user. The sent folder may contain copies of the emails sent from the user to other recipients; however, emails received by the user are not typically stored in the sent folder. Furthermore, many companies require that emails stored within the email program structure, which includes the sent folder, must be purged or deleted after a period of time has elapsed, such as 60 or 90 days. In fact, many companies perform this email cleanup automatically and without the knowledge of its users. In this case, the sent folder cannot be reliably used to retain copies of emails communicated to another party past the period of time for deleting emails.
Some methods of storing emails require a user to identify a root or target directory of an electronic storage medium such as a hard drive of a file server, where it is desired to save the email message. Other methods, however, do not prompt a user for a desired save location and save all emails to a single target directory. In this manner, emails having independent subject matter, sender, receiver, and the like, are stored together in the same location on the file server.
Other methods of storing an email message on an electronic storage device use user-selected options to create subfolders in a target directory. For example, subfolders may be created for the email sender, the date the email was sent, the recipients of the email, or the domain of the sender. When creating subfolders for senders, emails from one sender may be stored in a subfolder assigned to the one sender, and emails from another sender may be stored in a separate subfolder assigned to the other sender. However, one sender may send several emails, each relating to a separate topic of interest. Accordingly, the subfolder may contain emails from a particular sender that relate to multiple topics of interest. Such a convoluted system is particularly burdensome when locating and retrieving a stored email. Additionally, if stored in subfolders of the email program, they are generally not exempt from corporate purge policies.
It is often desirable, however, to store emails together in file locations according to topics of interest regardless of the sender. That is, it would be desirable to be capable of storing emails related to one topic of interest for several senders in one location and storing emails related to another topic of interest from the same or other senders in another location, and so on. Thus, it is desirable to segment and separately store emails based on subject matter. In this manner, for example, and in the context of a law firm, emails pertaining to a particular client matter may be stored in locations associated with the client files, and in particular, specially designated attorney-client correspondence files.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method and system of automatically storing emails relating to similar topics of interest on a computer storage medium in a storage location dedicated to or otherwise associated with the topic of interest.